Carnival in Hell: Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus

 

 Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes.  Translations of excerpts are my own; the German is provided in endnotes. 

 

 

     Grimmelshausen’s picaresque novel, Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus, like Goya’s engravings of scenes during the Peninsular War, provides a vivid picture of the disasters of war. Set during the Thirty Year’s War, one of the most destructive conflicts in history, in which the population of German lands was reduced by two-thirds through violence, disease, and starvation, the narration is full of blood, unrestrained cruelty, and sadism. Like Brecht’s play Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder which borrows the era and tropes on one of Grimmelshausen’s characters from a sequel to Simplicissimus, the material is grim and the work is unapologetically anti-war, though the main character, like workers throughout history, is willing to enlist in one army after another.  Yet the tone of this often violent narrative is paradoxically profoundly comic in the profound Rabelaisian vein Bakhtin called carnivalistic.

     The depredations of war on the German countryside are depicted in frightful detail. Tortures and peculiar sexual humiliation like kissing the victor’s anus are described [1] and the reader learns of the chaos and horrors of battle [2].  The verses that accompany the fascinating symbolic frontispiece of the book declare that the author’s purpose is to encourage readers to “abandon folly and live in peace” [3].  By the author’s estimation the human race is a bestial lot: “People are in  part more swinish than hogs, more fierce than lion, more lecherous than goats, more sly than foxes, more voracious than wolves, more foolish than apes, more poisonous than snakes and toads, yet all alike eat human food and only through their shape can they be distinguished from beasts.” [4]

     Human rapaciousness is evident not only in  the barbaric conduct of war; the entire structure of feudal society is shown to be profoundly exploitative.  Though many aspects of Grimmelshausen’s own background are obscure, he cannot be said to have had a privileged upbringing.  Orphaned at an early age, he either enlisted or was conscripted into a Hessian military unit while still a child.   While he later held various administrative positions of local importance under noble lords, his novel contains numerous critiques of the feudal order.  Though the utopia described by Jupiter is infected with German chauvinism, it nonetheless suggests the possibility of a society free from economic or religious discord.  Jupiter calls for an end to “corvées, watches, contributions, assessments, wars, or any other burdens on the people” as well as ending conflict among the Christian sects [5]. 

     Grimmelshausen questions the socio-economic hierarchy at the very outset, confusing categories by maintaining that Simplicissimus’ father was in a way like a monarch, having a palace (his home), lackeys (sheep and goats), arms (pitchforks and spades), a mode of life he calls “truly noble” [6].  He asks what title Adam had boasted [7], rather as John Ball three hundred years earlier had posed the question, “When Adam delved and Eve span, who then was the gentleman?”  This radical point of view simmers throughout the story.  At other points, to note only a few examples, Simplicissimus criticizes the practice of making military officers only of aristocrats, notes that only the poor are punished for their crimes, and laments that people are judged less by their own characters than by the opinions of their superiors [8].   When Simplicissimus dreams, he thinks of society as a tree with the workers, the only productive ones, as its roots.  

But the root was made up of people who count for little, like craftsmen, day laborers, mostly farmers and that sort, who nevertheless gave the tree its strength, and again rebuilt it when it lost some from time to time; indeed, they made up for the loss of fallen leaves from their own resources, to their own even greater ruin; besides, they sighed over those who sat on the tree [soldiers[, and not unjustly, for the entire burden of the tree rested on them, pressing them so much that all the money from their pouches, even from behind seven locks, slipped away.  [9]

     Who is the character who can so critically assess his own superiors?  At times he is a court jester, the figure considered traditionally to enjoy a particular privilege of speaking truth to power [10].  In this role he is able to “uncover all follies and criticize all vanities, for which role my position at the time suited admirably.” [11]  He is identified as a fool simply because he tells the truth [12]; his job is to “delicately point out their faults to this person and that” [13].

     Simplicissimus’ position as a “fool,” is expressed as well by his being called a calf (cf. the English term mooncalf) and by his display (like Midas, Apuleius, and Bottom) of asses’ ears.  While his lack of experience makes him in some ways ludicrous, it also signifies his purity.  He is like the young Parsifal, a genuine naïf, ignorant of the ways of the world and thus able to react in a fresh and spontaneous way [14].  His childhood is a sort of Eden, while the world around him is decidedly fallen. 

     The vogue for picaresque novels had been initiated with Lazarillo de Torres (1554) and Simplicissimus clearly belongs to the genre.  Considered in this light, the narrative is an amusing account of a trickster figure.  The bleak view of the world of unpredictable extreme violence is offset by the hero’s survival, generally through cunning means.  The reader can enjoy his adventures, since, no matter how often he falls, he always bounces back for another round.  As a trickster, he generally succeeds by means of outwitting his antagonists. 

     Though he had at first been described as a tabula rasa [15], he becomes something close to a culture hero with his inventions and innovations [16].  He resorts to trickery to get the best of a besieged city, a landlord, and his fellow soldiers [17].  Further, though he began knowing nothing whatever of God, he becomes something of a divine instrument.  His initial instruction by the pious hermit, his friendship with Herzbruder who is in a way his spiritual double, and his eventual retirement to the contemplative life at the end mark the foundation of his values in Christianity.  With his “clear conscience and sincerely pious mind”, he is shocked at the sinfulness of everyone around him, many of whom make idols of money  or food. He seems, in fact, to some “an oracle or the voice of God “ [18].  Overlaid atop the folkloric elements of Simplicissimus’ character is a strange sort of hagiography, in which the main character’s early misdeeds are followed by a conversion experience [19] and at the end as ascetic a hymn as one might imagine taking leave of the world [20].  Here Simplicissimus reminds the reader of other fables of spiritual growth such as Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West, Langland’s Piers Plowman, or Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

     And yet, it is difficult to take this old confidence man at his word.  He has earlier demonstrated such élan vital, such ebullience, rivalling the comically swollen appetites of Gargantua and Pantagruel.  Grimmelshausen’s affirmation of things as they are is evident in his style.  The picaresque template itself is bouyant, comic, optimistic.  The book mingles genres as though a single model would be too restrictive including stories within stories, sometimes verses (as in Bk. I, ch. iii) or a dialogue (Bk. I, ch. vii).  Often the language boils over in a rich plentitude, as when Simplicissimus lists the daily round of activities at his Edenic childhood home (Bk I, ch xi) or when he catalogues a long paragraph of examples of memory (Bk. II, ch. viii) or the much longer learned catalogue of heroes of humanity (Bk. II, ch. x).  Sudden rhetorical effusions belly out at times, such as when he describes a scene of gambling in a rich manner that recalls the paintings of Pieter Breughel the Elder.  The passage is lengthy, but it represents a host of similar pyrotechnic displays of language throughout the book.

 

Quite a few were missing, a number did win, only to squander what they got.  Because of that some cured and thundered.  Consequently some were cursing; some cheated , some received sword-blows.  Hence the winner laughed and other bettors ground their teeth.  Some sold their clothes and anything else they cherished, while others won back their money.  Some wanted honest dice while others wanted loaded ones in the game and introduced them surreptitiously.   Others then tossed them away, smashed them, tore them apart with their teeth and tore others’ coats from their shoulders.  Among the loaded dice were some from the Netherlands which one had to roll in a looping motion.  These had such pointed backs like the skinny donkeys the soldiers rode that they rolled fives and sixes.  Others were from the highlands, the sort that one had to toss from a Bavarian height, others from Hirschhorn, mad heavy on the top and light on the bottom, while others were filled with quicksilver or lead, yet others with trimmings of hair or with sponges, chaff, or coal.  While some had pointed corners, others were rounded; some were like long cobs while others resembled broad tortoises.  Every one of these varieties was made for nothing but cheating.  T hey did the very thing they ere made to do.  One could equally well rock or gently let them slide.  It didn’t help with knots,  not to speak of two fives or two sixes or, on the other hand, two ones or two twos.  With these scoundrels they pinched, plotted, and stole each other’s money, which they might well have robbed or at any rate risked life and limb or otherwise gained through hard effort and work.

 

     While this passage is more than ordinarily sustained, such effusions occur throughout [21] Simplicissimus and the author’s poetry can (for instance in his best-known lyric “Komm, Trost der Nacht”) sound almost mystical.  The unmistakable tone is one of acceptance and affirmation of a monstrously flawed world.  If the final message of Rabelais is the motto of the Abbey of Thélème “Do as thou wouldst,” Simplicissimus’ might be “struggle but celebrate.”  Grimmelshausen recognizes the suffering inherent in life which people then multiply with added cruelty absent in nature, and yet his hero jumps in whole-heartedly, eager to play the game and suffer the blows and witness all the absurdity of human behavior with a mordantly ironic eye when the scene is too dreadful to laugh out loud.  Others might paint a rosier view; unfortunately, it is difficult to imagine a truer.

 

  

 

1.  Bk. I, Ch. xiv.  See also the tortures for dissenters in even Jupiter’s utopia, Bk. III, ch. v.

2.  Bk. I, Ch. xxvii.

3.  “Entferne der Torheit und Lebe in  Ruh.”  The artist is unknown. 

4.  “Wie teils Menschen säuischer als Schwein, grimmiger als Löwen, geiler als Böck, neidiger als Hund, unbändiger als Pferd, gröber als Esel, versoffener als Rinder, listiger als Füchs, gefräßiger als Wölf, närrischer als Affen, und giftiger als Schlangen und Kröten waren, welche dennoch allesamt menschlicher Nahrung genossen und nur durch die Gestalt von den Tieren unterschieden waren.”  Bk. II, ch. 7.

5.  “Daß man von keinem Fronen, Wachen, Kontribuieren, Geldgeben, Kriegen noch einziger Beschwerung beim Volk mehr Wissen.”  Bk. III, ch. iv.  Bk. II, ch. v describes the plan to reconcile divided Christianity.  The racial component here (the primacy of Germany and the recognition of  England, Sweden, and Denmark as essentially Germanic) is disturbing. 

6.  “Sehr adelig.”  Bk. I, ch. i.

7.  “[Er] fragte, wie man der Menschen ersten Vater tituliert hätte?”  Bk. II, ch. x.

8.  Bk. I, ch. xvii; Bk. IV, ch. xiii, and Bk. II, ch. ii.

9.  (Bk. I, ch.  xv)  “Die Wurzel aber war von ungültigen Leuten, als Handwerkern, Taglöhnern, mehrenteils Bauren und dergleichen, welche nichtsdestoweniger dem Baum seine Kraft verliehen, und wieder von neuem mitteilten, wenn er solche zuzeiten verlor; ja sie ersetzten den Mangel der abgefallenen Blätter aus den ihrigen, zu ihrem eigenen noch größeren Verderben; benebens seufzeten sie über diejenigen, so auf dem Baum saßen, und zwar nicht unbillig, denn die ganze Last des Baums lag auf ihnen, und drückte sie dermaßen, daß ihnen alles Geld aus den Beuteln, ja hinter sieben Schlössern hervorging.”

10.  This role is referred to in Bk. II, ch. iv; Bk. III, ch. xi, and Bk. III, ch. xiv.

11.  “Alle Torheiten zu bereden und alle Eitelkeiten zu strafen, wozu sich denn mein damaliger Stand trefflich schickte.”  Bk. II, ch. x.

12.  “My lord himself said, ‘I toom you for a fool, since you spoke the truth so unashamedly.”  (Mein Herr selbst sagte: »Ich halte ihn für einen Narrn, weil er jedem die Wahrheit so ungescheut sagt.).  Bk. II, ch. xiii.

13.  “Dem einen und dem andern seine Mängel artlich verweisen möchte.”  Bk. II, ch. xiv.

14.  Cf. representations  of the infant Jesus, Jung’s “wise child,” etc.

15.  “Einer leeren ohnbeschriebenen Tafel.” Bk. I, ch. ix.

16.  Some of his marvelous inventions re described in Bk. III, ch. i.  He is an expert at making powder and artillery pieces in Bk. V, ch xxii.

17.  See Bk. III, ch. ix for the duel and siege, Bk. III, ch. xxiv for landlord, Bk. IV, ch. x for his comrades-in-arms. 

18.  “Ein reines Gewissen und aufrichtig frommes Gemüt.”  Bk. I, ch. xxiv.  “Ein Orakel oder Warnung Gottes.”  Bk. II, ch. xiii.

19.  Here in Bk. V, ch. ii., though Simplicissimus had seemed to be religious in earlier scenes. 

20.  “Etliche fehlten; etliche gewannen, etliche verspielten: derowegen auch etliche fluchten, etliche donnerten; etliche betrogen und andere wurden besäbelt. Dahero lachten die Gewinner, und die Verspieler bissen die Zähn aufeinander; teils verkauften Kleider und was sie sonst lieb hatten, andere aber gewinneten ihnen das Geld wieder ab; etliche begehrten redliche Würfel, andere hingegen wünschten falsche auf den Platz und führten solche unvermerkt ein, die aber andere wieder hinwegwarfen, zerschlugen, mit Zähnen zerrissen und den Scholderern die Mäntel zerrissen. Unter den falschen Würfeln befanden sich Niederländer, welche man schleifend hineinrollen mußte, diese hatten so spitzige Rücken, darauf sie die Fünfer und Sechser trugen, als wie die mageren Esel darauf man die Soldaten setzt. Andere waren oberländisch, denselben mußte man die bayrische Höhe geben, wenn man werfen wollte: etliche waren von Hirschhorn, leicht oben und schwer unten gemacht: andere waren mit Quecksilber oder Blei und aber andere mit zerschnittenen Haaren, Schwämmen, Spreu und Kohlen gefüttert; etliche hatten spitzige Eck, an andern waren solche gar hinweggeschliffen; teils waren lange Kolben, und teils sahen aus wie breite Schildkrotten. Und alle diese Gattungen waren auf nichts anders als auf Betrug verfertigt, sie taten dasjenige, wozu sie gemacht waren, man mochte sie gleich wippen oder sanft schleichen lassen, da half kein Knüpfens, geschweige jetzt derer, die entweder zween Fünfer oder zween Sechser und im Gegenteil entweder zwei Eß oder zwei Daus hatten: Mit diesen Schelmenbeinern zwackten, laureten und stahlen sie einander ihr Geld ab, welches sie vielleicht auch geraubt oder wenigst mit Leib- und Lebensgefahr oder sonst saurer Mühe und Arbeit erobert hatten.”  Bk. V, ch. xiv.

21.  See, for instance, the description of the dinner in Bk. I, ch. xxix or the following list of drinkers’ activities in Bk. I, ch. xxx. 

 

Lands of All Play and No Work: Cockayne and the Abbey of Thélème

 

Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes; those in parentheses either to lines of “the Land of Cockayne” or to chapters of Gargantua.   Translations from Rabelais are makeshift, but my own. 

 

      Eve and Adam were chagrined to discover that even in the Garden of Eden, there were rules, and in the twentieth century the Rolling Stones still complained “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”  St. John of the Cross adopted a contrarian approach, concluding that “In order to arrive at having pleasure in everything,/ Desire to have pleasure in nothing,” [1] but, several hundred years later, Freud treated the pleasure principle and its frustration as the most universal of motives.  People feel sufficient wistful longing for a world that never was, where limits no longer contain individual desire, that they have sometimes sketched dream-like pictures of impossible sensual utopias. 

     “The Land of Cockayne” (ca.1330) is contained in a book called the Kildare Lyrics which contains, for the most part, devotional and moralizing poems, an unsurprising subject matter as the collection was probably made by a Franciscan friar. Most are vigorous with vernacular and convey orthodox Christian sentiments, often in highly conventional treatments. [2]  The frolicking light-hearted tone of the first poem, “The Land of Cockayne,” is unique.  The poem is set “Fur in see bi west Spayngne,” perhaps in the neighborhood of the garden of the Hesperides, Hy-Brasil, or Tír na nÓg, the land of the ever-young.  In this land the residents enjoy uninterrupted pleasure (24), prominently including unlimited eating and drinking.  The catalogue of available culinary pleasures includes buildings made entirely of food and rivers of “oile, melk, honi and wine” (46).  A place of superabundant luxury, among the delights of Cockayne are precious gems on every side and the aromas of all the spices of the Orient. 

 

In the praer is a tre,

Swithe likful forto se.

The rote is gingeuir and galingale,

The siouns beth al sedwale,

Trie maces beth the flure,

The rind canel of swet odur,

The frute gilofre of gode smakke.

Of cucubes ther nis no lakke.  

                                                (71-78)

 What is more, fanciful whimsy is afforded free play.  There is no dirt, no flies, fleas, or lice (37).  In Cockayne the church windows are photochromic and adjust themselves to provide appropriate light.  The monks are so “heigh of mode” (125) that they flit about in the sky in play when they are not busy acting like stallions in teaching the nuns “a prayer,” “up and down” with “legs in the air” (165-167).

     In spite of the distractions, food is the primary appeal of the land.  In Cockayne cooked fowl fly to the diner to offer themselves.  Through the glorious plenitude of food in this land of wish-fulfillment one may glimpse the sometime rigors of a medieval diet.  The fascination with food is the obsession of the periodically deprived.  The dream of a full larder, often unrealized, had earlier found expression in the Classical cornucopia associated variously with Gaia, Plutus, Demeter, or Abundantia and the Dagda’s cauldron of plenty (the coire ansic) in Irish lore. 

     The speaker’s attitude toward this embarrassment of riches is unequivocal delight.  The monks flutter down from the sky for evensong, attracted by the exposed white buttocks of a “maidin,” (136) and the tone is altogether jolly.  Far from censorious, the poet’s attitude is “ribald,” with the sort of harmless innocence of adolescent fantasy difficult to imagine in the present era. 

     Though readers have sometimes taken the poem as a fiercely critical satire of clerical corruption, such a motive finds no support whatever in the text.  The poem opens with the speaker finding Cockayne so appealing, it is preferable even to Heaven.   

 

Þoȝ paradis be miri and briȝt.

Cokaygn is of fairir siȝt.

                                            (5-6)

(Though Paradise be merry and bright, Cockayne is a fairer sight.)

 And the poem ends with what looks very like instructions on how to “win” the prize of spending time in such a marvelous place.  One might atone for time in Cockayne by spending seven years wading in pig excrement but it sounds as though the author considers that a fair enough bargain.

 

Whose wl com þat lond to.

Ful grete penance he mot do.

Seue ȝere in swine-is dritte.

He mot wade, wol ȝe i-witte. ⁠

Al anon up to þe chynne.

So he schal þe lond[e] winne.

                                              (177-182)

(Whoever wishes to visit that land must perform a heavy penance.  Seven years in pigshit he must wade, up to his chin, you may well know, in order to win that land.)

 The poem ends with a prayer to God, not to protect Christians from worldly temptations, but rather kindly asking that the reader may one day enjoy the opportunity to experience Cockayne.

     Far from moralistic, the poem is an ebullient, light-hearted acknowledgement of the sensual inclinations of humans (indeed, of all organisms).  It no more implies acceptance of free love or gluttony than enjoyment of a Chaplin short requires endorsement of kicking people from behind.  Rather like the world of a silent film comic, the poet’s Cockayne is Carnivalesque; norms may be harmlessly transgressed in an interval of festive gaiety even if they revert to their default settings the next morning.  The low mimetic focus on appetite is far more conducive to comedy than to realism or idealizing, but the laughter is entirely hearty and sweet-tempered, far from the Swiftian “fierce indignation” of satire.. 

     The poem need not contradict the principles of a religious vocation.  Readers sometimes look for more consistency in literature than they do in life.  The same poet may write a tenderly respectful lyric and one of selfish lust, possibly even with the same evening in mind.  Both may be equally “true.”  The pious monk to whose book we owe the preservation of this poem may have seen no impropriety at all in having a wry laugh at the spectacle of human weakness.  “The Land of Cockayne” has preserved such a spell of sublime mirth in reaction to the human condition.  It is funny and warm and oh-so-human, the opposite pole from anything as serious as a polemic.     

     Two hundred years later, another presumably sincere monk, another Franciscan, in fact, at the beginning of his career, imagined an equally permissive territory, Gargantua’s Abbey of Thélème, where the sole rule of the order is notoriously “Do as you like” [3]  Far from being rooted in egoistic desire, this rule against rules expresses humility.  When Gargantua offers to reward his ally the valiant Friar John with the creation of a new and innovative religious establishment of his own design, the monk’s reply is charmingly modest: “But how” says the monk, might I be able to govern others when I am not able to govern myself?” [4]  Accordingly, Thélème invites both men and women to live together without any vows whatsoever. 

     Not only are the residents free from oppressive rules, they live in opulent luxury.  They go about in the finest clothes, covered with jewels.  Even their dressing is no chore, thanks to the attentions of their “masters of the wardrobe” [5].  They amuse themselves in a huge multi-story library.  Each is able to “read, write, sing, play musical instruments, and speak five or six languages” [6].  In addition, they enjoy the aristocratic amusements of hunting and hawking as well as agreeably passing time in each other’s society.  This is the greater pleasure, as they are all themselves beautiful people; neither men nor women may be admitted who are not “good-looking, well-built, and with a pleasant nature” [7].  The inscription over the abbey’s door invites “noble gentlemen” and “ladies of aristocratic birth” [8] while barring greedy professionals such as lawyers and usurers whose goal is the mean accumulation of wealth. Such mean money-grubbers are distasteful and likely to be ugly. 

     Moral excellence is bound up with intellectual achievements and aesthetic cultivation, indeed, with idleness, in this world in a fantasy of a sensitive and elegant ruling class, resembling nothing so much as the almost exactly contemporaneous world of Castiglione’s The Courtier.  It is as though Plato’s philosopher-kings did not have to bother with ruling, but could devote their entire lives to entertainments.  Contrary to history’s evidence, which has no lack or malicious and rapacious nobles, freedom makes them altogether virtuous.  “Because free people, well-born and educated, familiar with honest society, are by nature and impulse propelled always to virtuous acts and away from vice, by an impulse they call honor.“ [9]  The abbey is a post-industrial paradise in which people may develop their sensibility and, in fact, enjoy life without regard for the Reality Principle. 

     People in the “Land of Cockayne” found utter satisfaction in sensual delights of food and drink and love with only a few signifiers (like the beautiful tree, sweet odor, precious stones, and lovely birdsong   to betoken luxurious beauty. (67-100)  Placed in such a setting, with every appetite instantly satisfied, the reader might well imagine agreeing with the author’s encomium.

 

Þer n'is lond on erthe is pere.

Vnder heuen n'is lond iwisse.

Of so mochil ioi and blisse.

(21-⁠24)

            (No land on earth is its peer.  Under heaven there is no land, I                 know, of so much joy and bliss.)

      Since in Cockayne the only acknowledged human desires are physical, the tone is comic, in an ebullient Carnivalesque mode in which the human dependence on food and sex is ridiculous and insistent, but nonetheless endearing.  In the Abbey of Thélème the animal pleasures are taken for granted and the stress is on imaginative delights, culture, art, and civilized company, the sophisticated manipulative play with symbols that most distinguishes our species from the beasts.  Thus, while Rabelais’ tone is extravagant and fanciful, it contains as well a program for how to live life well that goes beyond a full belly, and among the fanciful and humorous elements notes of high seriousness are discernable. 

     While a dramatic contrast is evident between the riotous “low” aim of Cockayne’s utopia and the more “noble” and cerebral occupations of the Thélèmites, the two libidinal Edens have in common that each is enabled by the abolition of labor.  In Cockayne the unlimited availability of everything good means that competition need not exist.  There can be no motive for theft, no distinction between the industrious and the idle or, in the end, between the vicious and the virtuous when each individual is the recipient of superfluous unearned wealth.  The Abbey seems to be underwritten by Gargantua’s endless purse, so its residents need tend only to themselves.  The lifestyle of the inmates of Thélème is supported by an entire townful of workers: goldsmiths, jewelers, embroiderers, tailors, goldworkers, velvet-makers, tapestry makers, and upholsterers.” [10]  Of course, every high culture from ancient Athens through Heian Japan and Victorian England has been created by a leisure class of intellectuals and artists supported by the labor of others.

     Something not far from a land of “all play and no work” in which labor is pleasant and voluntary was conceived by William Morris in News from Nowhere and during the nineteen-sixties seemed actually possible to the theorists of “post-industrial society” [11], though working hours never shrank much and, in recent years, have been rising.  The work of Marshall Sahlins suggesting that hunter-gatherers who needed only to work fifteen to twenty hours a week to satisfy their needs were the original “affluent society” made the possibility of a largely work-free life more plausible.  

     In Genesis work seems to have arrived only to the fallen world where it seems very much like a punishment linked closely with mortality: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”  Perhaps the thrill of sexuality and the comfort of a good meal can only exist with the contrast of field-work or housework.  Even if pleasure cannot be experienced by one who does not feel pain as well, the thought of constant bliss (or at least well-being) is itself beguiling enough to inspire such dreams as the fabulous land of Cockayne and the wonderful Abbey of Thélème. 

 

  

1.  Ascent of Mt. Carmel 1.13.11.

 

2.  One poem “The Song of Michael of Kildare” identifies its author as "Frere Michel Kyldare,” and as a "frere menour."  Among the collection is a touching lullaby “Lollai, Lollai, litil child” and a verse reminiscent of Sei Shonagon “Five Hateful Things” beginning “Bissop lorles.”

 

3.  Ch 57 “Fay ce que vouldras.”

 

4.  Ch.  52  “Car comment (disait-il) pourrait-je gouverner autrui, qui moi-même gouverner ne saurrais?”

 

5.  Ch. 56 “Maîtres de garde-robes.”

 

6.  Ch. 57 “lire,  ecrire, chanter, jouer d’instruments harmonieux, parler de cinq et six langages.”

 

7.  Ch. 52 “belles, bien formées, et bien narturées.”

 

8.  Ch. 54 “Compagnons gentils” and “dames de haut parage.”

 

9.  Ch. 57 “Parce que gens libres, bien nés, bien instruits, conversant en compagnies honnêtes ont par nature un instinct, et aiguillon, qui toujours les pousse á faits vertueux, et retire de vice, lequel ils nommaient honneur.”

 

10.  Ch. 56 “orfèvres, lapidaires, brodeurs, tailleurs, tireurs d’or, veloutiers, tapissiers, et haut lissiers.”

 

11.  The term was popularized by Ivan Illich, Daniel Bell, and others after arising a few years earlier among the more utopian strains of leftists and cultural revolutionaries.  More recently, advocates of a guaranteed annual income have argued that not everyone need work.

The Lyricism of the Ugly: Céline's Mort à Crédit

Page references to quotations from Death on the Installment Plan are enclosed in parentheses and refer to the Signet edition, New American Library, 1966. Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes.


     The twentieth century was the great age of irony. One of the period’s masterworks, Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Mort à Crédit (expertly translated by Ralph Manheim [1] with the title Death on the Installment Plan) seems built largely of inversions and conundrums. For the author, the ugly is beautiful. According to Céline, “That's what Death on the Installment Plan is, symbolically, the reward of life being death. Seeing as . . . it's not the good Lord who rules, it's the devil. Man. Nature's disgusting, just look at it, bird life, animal life.” [2] The book resembles comedy in its depiction of everyman’s worst sins and faults and failings and in its emphasis on the physical with particular focus on shit and vomit, yet the tone is anything but light. It seems an autobiography, yet the book's protagonist is far more filthy and incompetent than the author, his relationships with family and others far more dysfunctional. We tend to call pictures of the seamy side “realistic,” yet the book is highly fanciful and full of hallucinations, delusions, and visions. The author’s celebrated ellipses, which one might expect to slow the narrative to a contemplative pace, instead accelerate it in a relentless onslaught on the reader's sensibilities. Much of the book’s early notoriety arose from its apparent perverse reveling in the nastiness of people and in their surroundings.
     Contradictions extend into the political realm. Céline was a committed fascist and a vicious anti-Semite, whose opinions, far from private, were published in inflammatory pamphlets before and during the Nazi occupation [3] yet my popular Signet edition from 1966 features blurbs from both Trotsky and Gide (a Communist at the time of the book’s publication). The author (like Heidegger) saw no contradiction in consistently maintaining Jewish friends and lovers while calling for the ruination of “international Jewry” and later drew the admiration of Allen Ginsberg [4] and Philip Roth who called him, pointedly, “a great liberator.” It helps little that even the Nazis were uncomfortable with Celine as an ally. [5] While he consistently portrays the common people as vicious and ignorant, he spent his medical career treating them in what amounted to charity clinics. He had an abiding sympathy for the poor and an anarchist’s distaste for bosses, police, and other authorities. He ridicules father Auguste in the novel for his paranoia in which Jews and Freemasons are responsible for his family’s suffering, yet he practiced precisely the same sort of ignorant scapegoating himself.
     In his narratives people act as though blind, doing their blundering best to pursue self-interest but helplessly in thrall to exploiters, who, though more comfortable, are no less benighted. His everyman is subject to an inexorable torrent of experience which will never slow sufficiently for one to gain a firm footing and which threatens at any moment to overflow in a riot of chaos. The tone is clear from the outset. The book begins as bleakly as anything in Beckett : “Here we are, alone again. It’s all so slow, so heavy, so sad . . .I’ll be old soon. Then at last it will be over.” (15) But this emptiness soon turns into a plenitude that boils over out of control. Before long he is having sex with Mireille in the Bois de Boulogne (39) and all hell breaks loose as countless spectators gather, requiring twenty-five thousand police to clear the area in a fully Rabelaisian scene. This hallucination is rationalized as a fever, but similar eruptions recur again and again. When the family attempts to have a nice vacation in England, the project collapses in disaster on the passage over with everyone is slipping and sliding in each other’s vomit (124-5) in what seems more a diabolical rite of passage than a catharsis. Angry crowds descend more than once on des Pereires’ Genitron offices just as multitudes of vermin erupt from his sorry attempt at a scientific potato garden.
     Céline’s political derangement had in common with Pound’s a revulsion with modernity, including that cash nexus that forms the basis for human relationships under modern capitalism. In his Paris Review interview he says “I really saw the world was ruled by the Golden Calf, by Mammon!” Ferdinand’s parents cannot adapt to a changing world. In his mother’s shop she sells lace of an outmoded style. In an attempt to keep up with contemporary fashion, she buys boleros, only to see them fall out of favor. Des Pereires is an inventor of the old school, an individual fiddling about in his workshop, clinging to his lighter-than-air balloon, a universal genius able only to devise one hare-brained scheme after another in the manner of Bouvard and Pécuchet.
     The hopeless despair of Céline’s world is only heightened and rendered poignant by occasional strange unearthly rays of light. Gazing at the nightlights of Paris from des Pereires’ suburban home, it seems a great appetitive beast, “an enormous animal, sprawled across the horizon . . . they eat . . . every day . . .yes, indeed, they eat . . . It makes a sad sound, a soft rumbling.” (468) Fellowship appears briefly and obliquely, but only to lament the inability of holding on to time, of stopping the rush of reality if only momentarily: “He was bound to be someplace, chasing after his pittance . . .and his fun.” “Ah, it’s an awful thing . . .and being young doesn’t help any . . .while you notice for the first time . . .the way you lose people as you go along . . . buddies you’ll never see again . . . never again . . . when you notice that they have disappeared like dreams . . .that it’s all over . . . finished . . . that you too will get lost someday . . . a long way off but inevitably . . . in the awful torrent of things and people . . . of the days and shapes . . . that pass . . . that never stop.” “They’re in a dream with the others.” (392)
     The tenderness of that unpreventable loss reminds the reader of Villon. [6] Several relatives also seem almost redemptive in their kindness. The narrator’s mother Clémence strives with unfailing will-power but diminishing strength to sustain her family and mollify her husband. “She did all she could to keep me alive. I just shouldn’t have been born.” This model of dogged maternal love is never modified by set-backs, fatigue, or mixed motives. ( 55) During Ferdinand’s teen-age years his Uncle Édouard repeatedly rescues him, offering him a refuge and resources in spite of the boy’s repeated failures.
     Perhaps most suggestive of the book’s acts of love, each more precious for its rarity, is Ferdinand’s grandmother Caroline’s gift to the child of a copy of lllustrated Adventure Stories in which he reads tales of King Krogold that inspire him to invent his own fairy stories as an alternative to an unacceptable reality. The painting done by the narrator’s father is a similar haven, as, one suspects, Céline’s tumultuous and fevered prose is as well, as Greek tragedy had been for an earlier age, a way to keep living even after realizing with Camus, that that task alone is Sisyphean.
     Earlier writers had so whitewashed the grim and nasty human situation that Céline thought it took a new language to reveal it. His claim that “I've slipped the spoken word into print” contains both a bit of a boast and a measure of truth. He influenced Henry Miller, the Beats, hard-boiled fiction, Genet, Queneau, Robbe-Grillet, and Bukowski who called him “the greatest writer of 2,000 years.” [7] “For me,” Céline says, “you only had the right to die when you had a good tale to tell. To enter in, you tell your story and pass on.” The reader can have no doubt that his story is sufficiently good to warrant a pass into Elysium, a sort of immortality.


1. John H. P. Marks had done a version in 1938. Manheim (whose translation was published in 1966) had begun his career with an edition of Mein Kampf preserving even awkwardness and solecisms in Hitler’s prose. He later did important translations of Brecht, Günter Grass, Martin Heidegger, Hermann Hesse, Novalis, and others as well as transcripts of Eichmann’s trial, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” which was illustrated by Maurice Sendak and Henry Corbin's work Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi.

2. Paris Review,” The Art of Fiction #33,” winter spring 1964 issue, no. 31. Subsequent quotations from Céline not identified by page reference in the novel are from the same interview.

3. Bagatelles pour un massacre (Trifles for a Massacre) (1937), L'École des cadavres (The School of Corpses) (1938) and Les Beaux draps (The Fine Mess) (1941).

4. According to Ginsberg Voyage a la bout de la nuit was “the first genius international beat twentieth-century picaresque novel written in modern classical personal comedy prose."

5. While WWII was still in progress, he came to believe that both Adolf Hitler and Pope Pius XII must both be Jewish imposters since they were failing to defend the white race with sufficient energy.

6. I think of the “Ballade Des Dames Du Temps Jadis,” “Les Regrets De La Belle Heaulmière,” the Testaments, and many other pieces. Villon also resembles Céline in his literary use of slang and underworld argot.

7. In Notes of a Dirty Old Man.

Notes on Pan

Mythology is always elastic and dynamic, and Pan strikes me as more given to shape-shifting than some. A divinity that might have seemed likely to dwell in the humbler precincts of Olympus, half beast in fact, and patron of backward herdsmen, Pan developed into a personification of both principal god and devil. Though an importunate sexually aroused serial rapist, Pan has been as well the occasion for a vision of Ultimate Reality. These observations stubbornly would not cohere, so I present them as a series of notes.




Pan’s Sphere

     Pan’s name was derived from “pasturer,” and the god governed the opposite pole of Zeus’ royal court: those semi-wild heights, unowned by any so free to all, where sheep or goats could find fodder. His pipes resemble those used by Greek shepherds from the third millennium BCE. Like the land that could sustain domestic animals, he was a blessing, with the epithet of “luck-bringer,” but at times, both in the mountains and on the battlefield, he could bring on panicked terror as well. He personifies sexual desire, but sometimes pursues females with selfish passion, according to the stories of Echo and Pitys. His frightening aspect could be beneficent as in Pheidippides’ report of his aiding the Greeks by causing panic among the Persians is told by Herodotus, [1] but it gave even the Arcadians pause. His intimate appeal to the individual is perhaps implied in the fact that the archaeological remains reveal a great many dedications but few dedicated temples. Offerings to Pan were often left in the wilderness.
     Philologists tell us that the folk etymology pan = all (accepted in late antiquity) is inaccurate, yet it has a broad unfocused appropriateness for a deity of generation, and Pan has often been used to represent paganism as a whole. Human awe at the ability of life to generate new plant and animal life led to exaggeration of his sexual characteristics and his frequent ithyphallic representation in art.
     These characteristics are attested by the poets. Pindar refers to Pan’s archaic identity as an attendant of the Great Mother, a role consistent with his association with fertility. [2] Stories of Pan’s human mother (said to be Penelope in her wild older years) [3] doubtless encouraged people to feel closer to Pan than to the full Olympians. In Euripedes’ Helena Pan’s capacity for exciting terror is the focus, here with reference to the rape of a naiad. [4] Pan stands at the very opening of Theocritus’ Idylls. In an atmosphere both rural and erotic, Thyrsis praises the Goatherd’s music as second only to Pan’s, associating both with ample meat to complete the festive note, yet he also refers to the threat of Pan’s anger when disturbed at his siesta. One delights in food and in love only if one also is liable to the pains of a lack of either. The same interdependent complex is implied in Theocritus’ VIIth Idyll in which the poet appeals to Pan for success in love, but incidentally refers to the custom of flagellating Pan with onions when food proves insufficient.


Pan in Plato

     In his Cratylus Plato echoes Hesiod’s muses who warned humans (whom they called “mere bellies”) that, while they may deliver the truth, they also “know how to speak many false things as though they were true.” [5] Socrates tells Hermogenes that Pan is “double-formed” because “speech signifies all things (pan), and is always turning them round and round, and has two forms, true and false.” [6] This striking anticipation of modern concepts of the inherent limitation of language occurs in a dialogue which has, quite appropriately, itself been viewed with uncertainty by readers who cannot tell what is meant to be Socrates’ position on the issue of whether the signifier is linked to the signified or is wholly arbitrary. Socrates changes his mind, or at least the direction of his argument in mid-dialogue. Further, the lengthy presentation of fanciful etymologies has been considered satirical by some and serious by others.
     Socrates does trace a pattern in these weird imaginative speculations on the origins of words: the repeated mention of flux. To him this signifies a fundamental doubt at the basis of the world-view of the “name-givers” which has led them to insert hints of instability into the verbal code. “Namemakers believed everything to be in flux. Suppose it should prove that although those who gave the names gave them in the belief that all things are in motion and flux—I myself think they did have that belief— still in reality that is not the case, and the namegivers themselves, having fallen into a kind of vortex, are whirled about, dragging us along with them.” [7]
     In the end Socrates is not so distant from Huang Po who directed his listeners to gaze to the Mind behind phenomena, reinforcing rather than negating everyday experience in the process. Lacking the nonverbal intuition by which both Greek and the Chinese thinkers apprehended truth, Cratylus can only play the part of the absolute skeptic.
     In the Phaedrus Pan was Socrates’ god of choice to whom he offers a most philosophic prayer, directing his words also, in a pleasantly ecumenical gesture, to “whatever gods may be present.” Socrates asks for inner perfection and for only such possessions as a reasonable man can handle, noting that the only true wealth is wisdom. [8]


Pan and Christ

     Herodotus suggests that Pan is, along with Dionysus and Heracles, a younger god [9] yet he adds that, among the Egyptians (who, he assures his readers, kept excellent records) he is considered to be very ancient. The archaic character of his role as producing fertility, both plant and animal, in wild regions, might seem to support the latter judgment, at least as far as a local cult in Arcadia is concerned. He shares with Christ, Dionysus, and Heracles the non-Olympian characteristic of a mixed human/divine parentage and a career including the human experience of death.
     Plutarch [10] tells the story of Thamus, the Egyptian ship’s pilot, who learned in a divine vision of the death of the god, news which eventually reached Tiberius who launched an investigation. As the date of this incident happened to coincide, roughly, at least, with the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, the story has been used to signify the end of paganism and the triumph of the Christian deity with his resurrection. For Eusebius it added to what he saw as considerable evidence that the pre-Christian gods has departed to make way for his god. [11] By the time of the Renaissance, the death of Pan had come to signify not the departure of the Greek deities, but Christ’s redemptive death itself. Orthodox authors such as Rabelais (for whom, of course, Panurge and Pantagruel are heroes) and Guillaume Bigot identified the two gods and treated Pan’s death as a figurative way of speaking of Christ’s own. [12] Rabelais says, “For my part, I understand it of that great Saviour of the faithful who was shamefully put to death at Jerusalem by the envy and wickedness of the doctors, priests, and monks of the Mosaic law. And methinks my interpretation is not improper; for he may lawfully be said in the Greek tongue to be Pan, since he is our all. For all that we are, all that we live, all that we have, all that we hope, is him, by him, from him, and in him. He is the good Pan, the great shepherd, who, as the loving shepherd Corydon affirms, hath not only a tender love and affection for his sheep, but also for their shepherds.” [13]
     This reading of Pan as a symbol of Christ reached England as well. In the month of “Maye” in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar Pan is simply a code-word for Jesus: “When great Pan Account of Shepherds shall ask.” (54) Milton follows in his “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” in which the shepherds find that “the mighty Pan/ Was kindly com to live with them below.” [14]



Pan and the Romantics

     Wordsworth and Byron both used Pan as the representative of a paganism which for them meant primarily aesthetic values. When Byron recounts the story from Plutarch of Pan’s reported death in “Aristomenes,” Pan represents paganism as a whole. The loss of the pre-Christian world-view seems to the poet an aesthetic loss.


How much died with him! false or true—the dream
Was beautiful which peopled every stream
With more than finny tenants, and adorned
The woods and waters with coy nymphs that scorned
Pursuing Deities, or in the embrace
Of gods brought forth the high heroic race


     For Wordsworth this meant a gentle soothing landscape picturesqueness as in the sonnet “Composed By the Side of Grasmere Lake” in which “Great Pan” “low-whispers” “tranquility is here.” One recalls that in “The World Is Too Much With Us” the poet wishes that, as a pagan, he might be made “less forlorn” by such entertainments as the “sight of Proteus rising from the sea;/ Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.” This is religion reduced to the amusement of sight-seeing.
     In Shelley’s “Hymn to Pan” the god is not, as in Wordsworth and Byron, the representative of a picturesque and charming mythology, but is instead a model for the very human experience of delusive desire.


“I pursu'd a maiden and clasp'd a reed.
Gods and men, we are all deluded thus!
It breaks in our bosom and then we bleed.
All wept, as I think both ye now would,
If envy or age had not frozen your blood,
At the sorrow of my sweet pipings.”


     (Mary Shelley for her part wrote a play Midas -- which I have yet to read -- with two lyrics by Percy to open with the music contest between Apollo and Pan.)
     Keats is far profound, original, and provocative in his use of Pan as a sort of objective correlative of negative capability. In Endymion [15] Pan is first described as a Romantic nature spirit ruling “desolate places, where dank moisture breeds/ The pipy hemlock to strange overgrowth.” to whom “yellow-girted bees” offer their honey. He is associated with the sort of magic likely among farmers “Breather round our farms,/ To keep off mildews, and all weather harms,” yet for Keats he is above all mysterious. The “Strange ministrant of undescribed sounds,” and “Dread opener of the mysterious doors/ Leading to universal knowledge.” At the hymn’s conclusion this has become a virtual mystic via negativa:


be still the leaven,
That spreading in this dull and clodded earth
Gives it a touch ethereal—a new// birth:
Be still a symbol of immensity;
A firmament reflected in a sea;
An element filling the space between;
An unknown


Pan and Neo-Paganism

     The earlier use of Pan to represent all pagan deities persisted into the nineteenth century, though the associated values altered. Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the extended exclamations of “The Dead Pan” maintains a conventional preference for the new god, “one in Sion/ Hung for love’s sake on a cross,” but her successors did not prove always so orthodox. To some post-Romantic poets, this god’s resemblance to the Christian devil in his horns and cloven hooves proved more an attraction than an impediment to his renewed worship as an icon of eroticism, forbidden pleasure in general, and the unconscious.
     This use of Pan as a mask to protest appears in Baudelaire. In “La Muse Malade” Pan is recognized as god of poetry together with Apollo, but the recognition is largely nostalgic. This belated author’s muse is characterized by “folie et l'horreur, froides et taciturnes.” In “L'École païenne” Pan is identified directly with revolution and his return with the end of the tyrannical reign of Christianity. Baudelaire details this view in The Painter of Modern Life [16] he maintains “The birthplace of Painting is the Temple. Its roots are in religion. The modern temple and the modern Religion are the Revolution. Thus let us create the Temple of the Revolution and the Painting of the Revolution . . . Pan must kill god. Pan is the people.”
     Varieties of this counter-cultural Pan are discernable in paintings by Burne-Jones such as Psyche and Pan [17] in which a dubious looking naked female stands well below an amorous Pan whose coiffure is positively architectural. The excitable Swinburne identifies Pan with élan vital in “A Nympholept”; the even more irregular Aleister Crowley made Pan a major symbol of his Thelemic mysticism and sang wildly of his wish to “Thrill with lissome lust of the light.” [18] Most readers of poetry can call to mind e. e. cummings’ balloon man, at first called “little” and “lame,” then “queer” and “old,” until the cat is let out of the bag and he is said to be “goat-footed.” [19]






1. Histories, (I, 105).

2. Pythian iii. 77, fr. 6. 1.

3. Apollodorus Epitome (7.38) says Odysseus’ Penelope conceived Pan after she was ousted for infidelity by the hero.

4. 167-190.

5. Theogony, ll. 26-28.

6. 408.

7. 439c.

8. 279.

9. Histories, II. 145.

10. Moralia, “The Obsolescence of Oracles,” 419.

11. Eusebius of Caesaria, Praeparatio Evangelica, Ch. XVII.

12. By the beginning of the 18th century this trend had become sufficiently pronounced to be ridiculed. Thus Fontenelle comments, “Ce grand Pan qui meurt sous Tibere, aussi bien que Jesus-Christ, est le Maistre des Demons, dont l'Empire est ruine par cette mort d'un Dieu si salutaire a l'Univers; ou si cette explication ne vous plaist pas, car enfin on peut sans impieté donner des sens contraires a une mesme chose, quoy qu'elle regarde la Religion; ce grand Pan est Jesus-Christ luy-mesme, dont la mort cause une douleur et une consternation generale parmy leg Demons, qui ne peuvent plus exercer leur tirannie sur les hommes. C'est ainsi qu'on a trouve moyen de donner a ce grand Pan deux faces bien differentes.” This passage and many more are included in O. Weinreich’s article “Zum Tode des Grossen Pan,” published in ARW 13 (1910) pp. 467-73).

13. Book. IV, Ch. 24. This is Urquhart’s version.

14. ll. 89-90.

15. The passages cited all occur in the episode in I, 232-306.

16. In Chapter 10, “Philosophic Art.”

17. See also “The Garden of Pan” in which a buff lad plays his pipes for a pair of lovers while gazing directly at the viewer.

18. “Hymn to Pan.”

19. “in Just-“

Notes on Recent Reading 8 [Bakhtin, Lewis, Brown]

Rabelais and his World [Bakhtin]

     Bakhtin’s book has made a significant contribution to the understanding of Rabelais (as well as explaining his centuries-long misinterpretation), but, even more importantly, it establishes a new category of humor that shapes the reader’s understanding of comedy itself. That the author did his important work under Stalin’s regime is the more remarkable
     Bakhtin’s revealing information on topics such as folk observances, vituperative speech, Cyprian’s Dinner, and the Easter laugh would alone make the book worth reading. The application of these data to Rabelais was ground-breaking; such analyses as the discussion of the wedding customs of the Bum-bailiffs in Book Four (to take an example almost at random) are persuasive, magnifying rather than diminishing the strength of the texts.
     But the greatest achievement of Bakhtin’s book is to define a unique form of comedy, one associated with the Carnival holiday, a universalizing humor embracing all of humankind, the wise and comely as well as the ridiculous, a sort of grand upwelling of spirit in which the dualities of pain and pleasure, life and death dissolve in laughter. Rabelais and his World is a rare book of criticism. A work of art in itself, it illuminates a text but teaches the reader as well about literature in general and even, perhaps, a bit about life.


It Can’t Happen Here [Lewis]

     I do recall the pleasure of a suburban sixth-grader looking for allies in his opposition to the “booboisie” (to use Mencken’s term). The satiric shots in Main Street may have had targets already a generation gone, but every one of them was pointed in the correct direction. I fancy, though, that even then I suspected Lewis of being a bit flat, his points repetitive, his analysis shallow and too easy.
     In fact It Can’t Happen Here is best read as a potboiler, a genre on which Lewis had cut his teeth. As a boy’s adventure story it is almost readable, while artistically and on the political thematic level, it is a labored exercise. The view from Sauk Centre made the small fish, the petty bourgeoisie, look like the ruling class. Poor taste can seem a greater issue than greed, a small-town Babbitt a more despicable enemy than a robber baron. But Lewis never goes in to what really motivates even the follower in fascism: the aggression, economic insecurity, and scapegoating that can combine to make a rank-and-file Nazi or Tea Partier. His stormtroopers are vulgar rubes who dress in drag and blackface for “good, old-time Elks Club humor.” Jessup, the Vermonter who might as well have been Midwestern, thinks that those who “mind their own business” very likely rank higher in heaven than such “plumed souls” as the abolitionists.
     Lewis had interrupted his education at Yale to spend time in Upton Sinclair’s short-lived experimental community, the Helicon Home Colony, but it may be that neither Yale nor the communards transformed him altogether. I am pleased to report that he does declare for some sort of Cooperative Commonwealth at last which places his social thought still in advance of the early twenty-first century.


Wieland [Brown]

     A decent read yet today, Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland resembles its British predecessors of earlier decades as an epistolary seduction novel while emphatically Gothic, like books in the more recent fashion.
     In the new American land, the author poises himself delicately between many of his oppositions. The Lockean reliance on perceptions is here traduced by false sense impressions while the pious man falls prey to monstrous delusion. The characters are only recent Americans with ties yet to Europe, and the action occurs in a kind of historic breather between the French and Indian and the Revolutionary Wars. The sensational Gothic side-show attractions of spontaneous combustion and “biloquism” are neither fully accounted for as in the Radcliffe’s “explained supernatural” nor are they as mysterious as in Walpole. The potential Eden of the American forest turns hellish. Its residents sidestep Europe’s centuries-long accretions of injustice only to enact a more monstrous scenario.
     The reader may wonder, though, whether Brown is in fact subtly playing both ends of these dualities or if he is simply careless. Carwin is never really motivated and Louisa is quite forgotten by her author (until the very end). The description is Romantic to a fault, but, especially when representing emotional states, it is repetitive and over-amplified.
     The book is particularly susceptible to self-reflective readings in which Carwin’s voices are a figure for the author’s speaking in the first-person narration. The plot depends on misunderstanding and missed communications as well as on things unknowable to the characters. In fact it is sufficiently underdetermined that the reader at the end is likely to feel unsatisfied.

Rereading the Classics [Rabelais]

     In a few months, I shall visit Portugal. We have engaged a room in Navaré on the coast during the days of Carnival and shall blame only ourselves if we are kept awake by revelry. I have, in anticipation, been thinking of Bakhtin’s study of Carnival customs and of Rabelais. While dealing with Stalinism and his own osteomyelitis, Bakhtin found in the great Renaissance monk an irresistible source of laughter, a way to cope with being human, with belches and farts and pains and death and murderous hypocrites in power all the while.
      Now, of course, physicality has always been a major source of humor, puncturing pretensions and downing idealistic flights of fancy. It is the stock in trade of clowns, of commedia dell’arte, and of a good many contemporary comic actors like Jim Carrey. Though comedy often springs from the most material human attributes, the abstract logical mind is the another major source, perhaps equally significant. This reflects the human predicament: as Pascal had it, neither wholly angelic nor wholly bestial. [1] Thus cerebral humor like incongruities and puns generate a laugh as well as pratfalls and stomach gurgles. [2]
     The physical side has attracted the most attention to Rabelais. His reputation for obscenity and crudity is, in the end, inconsistent with his utter normalcy; his body-consciousness strikes the reader as unusually healthy. In spite of the basic impulse of monasticism to reject the world, Rabelais embraces physicality, not with resignation but with joy. Life, death, eating, excreting are such fun, such loci of energy that they inevitably spawn great torrents of words. Rather than fleeing their humanity, Gargantua and Pantagruel magnify it through their gigantism, and the language does its best to keep up.
     His book, however, is as erudite as it is vulgar. Of course, the manipulation of symbols is indeed more distinctly human than intestinal gas, at which bovines, for instance, far surpass us. Surely the mind is the single characteristic that most distinguishes our species, the most critically important in the development of homo sapiens. Semiotic use belongs to humanity as pouncing to cats or webs to spiders, and Rabelais delights in language, the most sophisticated code in existence. His book is filled with effervescent examples of what the medievals called amplificatio, piling it on, compiling great catalogues, adding one largely synonymous figure to another, listing authorities as though presenting a learned argument. He makes endless allusions, employs every sort of rhetoric and verse imaginable, and elaborates commentaries on commentaries for the sheer exhilarated joy of it. Knowing no bounds, he invents outlandish names and words, and shuffles foreign tongues together. Such Whitmanic/Joycean exuberance in a learned French monk!
     Loving language, he loves literature, and book-studies of all kinds. He is full to overflowing; he is encyclopedic. He mixes high and low styles in a way that would have seemed barbaric to the ancients. In the list of Gargantua’s games one feels the pulse of life even more than in Breughel’s painting. In Xenomanes’ description of King Lent [3] are a hundred surrealist images. Few others construct such grand textures of words out of playful high spirits alone.
     His rhetorical figures correspond precisely to the author’s world-view. He is constitutionally filled with a buoyant delight at existence, inspired by learned studies no less than by a fine dinner or an admirable sunrise. This delight in simply being alive is stronger in some passages than others, but never absent through the entire work. This is surely in fact the work’s most significant theme. It may be true, as the Buddha said that life is suffering, but it is no less true that life is joyful, and it can only be salutary to look through the eyes of one who expresses the other half of the undeniable self-contradictory truth. As Rabelais says, echoing Aquinas in his initial address to his readers: “to laugh is natural to men.” [4]
     Pantagruelism, according to its creator, arises from “a certain jollity of mind, pickled in the scorn of fortune” [5] But in fact, what the translator calls “jollity” is in French gaîté, and this word has a long history in French poetry. Among the troubadours “gai” was used to imply a sort of sublimity bordering on divine afflatus. [6] Thus gai saber came to be used for the “sciences” of poetry composition and of lovemaking as in the 14th century Consistori del Gay (or Gai) Saber. Rabelais in the stirrings of the Reformation and Nietzsche with the 19th century “death of God” both saw the world opening before them.
     Nietzsche says in his Fröhliche Wissenschaft, “Indeed, we philosophers and ‘free spirits’ feel, when we hear the news that ‘the old god is dead,’ as if a new dawn shone on us; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonitions, expectation. At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright; at long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an “open sea.’” [7]
     In a temperament of a soberer sort, George Santayana thought of the world as a grand mardi gras, saying “It is a great Carnival, and amongst these lights and shadows of comedy, these roses and vices of the playhouse, there is no abiding.” [8] In fact, Pantagruel’s whole story, like that of Dante or of Monkey in Journey to the West is a journey toward enlightenment.
Less foregrounded, but a natural consequence of Rabelais’ sensibility, is his political radicalism, his uncompromising sharp satire of the ruling class of church and state, and his admiration for More’s communist utopia. Bakhtin was on the money, as many subsequent critics have agreed, when he associated Rabelais’ attitude with the social practices around Carnival in which social order was overturned, at once revealing temporarily the artificiality of the everyday and reinforcing its essential reality by playfully enacting its opposite. All laughter has an element of letting go, of a sudden release of repressed ideas. [9] When Epistemon’s throat is cut and he finds himself in the underworld, social roles are reversed. [10] Kings and conquerors are reduced to beggary, while the philosophers prosper. Of course, in the Abbey of Thélème, with its slogan “Do as thou wouldst,” the inmates need not support themselves; indeed, like nobles, they have troops of workmen to provide their needs. Their behavior is decorous due to the aristocratic virtue of “honor,” really an aesthetic category. Still, Rabelais’ book must be counted among those that presaged the breakdown of Roman Catholic hegemony and of European feudalism, though what followed was not liberation but new varieties of Protestant intolerance and capitalist exploitation.
     Am I the only reader to suspect a poignant note in the constant barrage of good humor about drinking alcohol? To me it sounds as though, for all the ebullient story-telling, all the optimistic brio, all the hearty Renaissance self-celebration, the subject in the end must seek some anesthetic or analgesic at least to make it through the night. Even the healthiest of monkish physicians felt the need for a chemical fix when it seemed that reality was gaining on him. In addition the fantasies of titanic meals may be seen as the inversion of the sort of starvation anxiety Bettelheim found in stories like Hansel and Gretel. Clearly, the fantastic liberty of actors like Pantagruel and Panurge gains its appeal from the compromised and highly programmed lives most people live. Similarly, Rabelais’ frequent “jolly” references to people identified as physically ill (most often “syphilitics” and “gouty ones,” two conditions that were associated with over-indulgence) reinforces the fact of mortality and the transience of worldly things. Just as in ancient Greek and Chinese poetry, the recognition of the illusory nature of pleasure heightens its enjoyment even as it adds a dark shadow to the scene.
     Glorious as I find him, Rabelais is not, indeed, to everyone’s taste. For those of us who like to believe in the power of words, it is gratifying to find that the Church is still after him as it was during his life. The Catholic Encyclopedia says of Rabelais’ book, “It is impossible to analyse it” yet adds as well the caution: “as a whole it exercises a baneful influence.” I would not blame the pious fathers for doubting that the author of Gargantua and Pantagruel was a believer in original sin.
     He is also capable of offending George Orwell who calls him precisely what he is not: “an exceptionally perverse, morbid writer, a case for psycho-analysis.” Orwell marvels that “anyone can find something ‘normal’ and ‘hearty’ in coprophilia,” [11] and suggests that Rabelais’ reputation can only exist due to people’s failing to actually read his book.
     Orwell wrote on the eve of the immensely and deservedly popular translation of an abridgement by Samuel Putnam. Urquhart/Motteux is good fun but can tire the reader. J. M. Cohen’s Penguin version is complete and reliable as well as inexpensive and easily available. Donald M. Frame’s The Complete Works of François Rabelais is the best current scholarly version for serious students who don’t read French. I can only think that the more people who read Rabelais, the better. He is an enormous spirit and we can all use the tolerance, good sense, and profound learning as well as his high spirits which delighted not only in food and drink but in the most entertaining play of all, the play of the mind.






1. Blaise Pascal, Pensées 329.

2. For the gastric sounds I am thinking of Chaplin’s “stomach duet” with a charitable prison visitor in Modern Times, for which he created the noises himself by blowing bubbles into a pail of water.

3. Book IV, chapters 30-32 contains such figures as “his lungs like a fur-lined hood,” “his imagination like a peal of bells,” and “if he blew his nose, it was salted eels.”

4. Rabelaisian it may sound, but the line is directly from the Summa Theologica, LI, 1.

5. “Une certaine gaîté d'esprit confite dans le mépris des choses fortuites.” In Urquhart’s edition, though by this point translated by Motteux, from the prologue to Book IV. Motteux was also an early translator of Don Quixote, though, according to Samuel Putnam, he was very free, adding obscene material in particular and omitting at liberty while emphasizing the “slapstick.” His death in a brothel led to a sensational closely watched trial.

6. See, for instance, the Contessa de Dia’s “Ab joi et ab joven m’apais,” William IX’s “Pos de chantar m'es pres talenz,” and Peire Vidal’s “Ab l’alen tir vas me l’aire.”

7. Aphorism 343 of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft in Walter Kaufmann’s translation. Nietzsche owes to Emerson for these concepts. Among the many commentators, Harold Bloom regards Nietzsche as “Emerson’s belated rival.”

8. Santayana 34 in "Carnival" from Soliloquies in England and later soliloquies.

9. For Freud, humor arose from a rejection of reality and a triumph for the pleasure principle, the superego temporarily allowing the ego to gain id satisfaction from introducing tabooed topics. Among the likely sources of comedy, then are sex and scatology, heterodoxy and revolution.

10. Rabelais owes a debt, here, to Lucian’s Menippus.

11. The line is from a dismissive review of Albert Cohen’s now-forgotten Nailcruncher that appears in George Orwell, My country right or left, 1940-1943, p. 45-6. I am curious as to what episode Orwell thought could properly be termed “coprophilic.”